The name Aino Kuusinen is all but unknown in the United States. This is unfortunate, for the life story of this undercover agent--a highly attractive, intelligent, and courageous woman, who spoke her English with an American accent--is a parable that illuminates an entire age.
In the early 1920s she escaped from the ties of a respectable middle-class Finnish family by marrying a fellow Finn in the new communist nomenklatura in Moscow. She then worked for the Communist International (Comintern) and met virtually everyone who was anyone in that world. For most of the 1930s she traveled as a Soviet agent: to depression-struck New York where for some three years she worked for the Comintern; through Europe as Hitler consolidated his power; to Tokyo where for another three years she worked for the Red Army in collaboration with the Sorge spy ring. In the 1940s and 1950s, by falling back on her original vocation as a nurse, she survived some fifteen years in Stalin's Gulag. In 1966, still vigorous and spirited, the old lady outwitted her minders to escape to Western Europe, where she wrote her memoirs. She subsequently suffered a not uncommon fate for defectors, dying as a lonely recluse in exile. Despite this, in her survival of the camps and her escape from the empire she once served may be found those elements of courage and hope which occasionally alleviate the grim narrative of twentieth-century totalitarianism.
A Non-Person in America
